Linux - NewbieThis Linux forum is for members that are new to Linux.
Just starting out and have a question?
If it is not in the man pages or the how-to's this is the place!

Notices

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.

You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!

Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.

If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.

Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.

Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

hi all;
I am new to linux. I want to learn how to use the dd command to create a iso image of my xp drive. so I can put it in vbox without reinstall from the beginning. Is it possible? and what is the cmd ?
I have read the how to dd and try it out, but it is not working.

Virtual box images may be different than an image of a partition.
Also, an ISO image is an image of an ISO-9660 filesystem for a disc. I'd recommend calling it an image and using a .img extension to avoid confusion.

You need to first determine which filesystem contains XP. You can run "sudo /sbin/fdisk -l" to list the partitions. You might be able to tell from the size, or maybe you only have one partition on that disk. If not you can check with "sudo file -s <device>".

Suppose WinXP is on /dev/sda2, and you have an external drive mounted on /mnt/ that has enough space for the image.
sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/xp.img bs=1M

The input is /dev/sda2, the device node for the filesystem. The output is /mnt/xp.img, a file on the external drive. (note: you can't use a fat32 filesystem. Files can't be over 2GB.) bs is the blocksize. I just made up 1M. Another value may work faster.

Another program you could use is dd_rescue. It is used to create images of partitions when there is a problem reading some sectors on the drive. If there are no problems, the process goes quickly. If there are, the program drops down the block size and retries. I found this method to be very fast for creating an image file.
sudo dd /dev/sda2 /mnt/xp.img

thank you very much for your help. I appreciated very much if you could help me for the current problem first
I used my desktop pc running fedora 14 to dd my xp drive (hooked up ext. usb) as suggested, and save it in /media.
everything seem to be ok. turn off pc and restart next day. It wont boot up and I get this error message
"configuration default for Gnome power manager have not been installed.".
I googled the error message. I used live cd to remove the image file successfully.
restart. no go, same message plus one new one
" usr/libexec/gconfig-sanity-check-2 exited with status 256"